How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs)

22:10Is there anything you've learned? Like, give it a signal that, let's keep working. I'm going to stay optimistic about this thing. I spent a lot of time really thinking hard about crypto and like, whether I was just reacting to it because it threatened some part of my identity or whatever. And I never kind of, I never came down to the, to anything that seemed valuable. I mean, that was always the thing for me is just, like, there has to be a what if that I can say, you know, well, what if this works, like, how valuable is it? For crypto, I was like, well, what if it works? Like, then I have to run upsec on my personal finances.

22:42That sounds just to be it. I don't want that. Like, I can't think of anything as a user that I think actually like is valuable here, even in the best case. So I feel like the pessimism is justified. Like that's, so that's like one of my other kind of root principles is just like, it's all that user value. Users are lazy, right? We're all lazy. We don't really care that much at the end of the day. No one's going to do something really in their life for any other reason other than it makes their life better. Nobody cares that you're friendly or nice or the logo is pretty or whatever or like they care about, you know, making their life easier.

23:13We're all cynical at heart at some level. So, you know, if you can't point at user value, significant user value, it's not going to work. You know, it's not going to, it doesn't matter. Show all the marketing dollars into it you want. You can write all articles you want, but like, you know, it's got to actually solve a problem, a real problem at the end of the day. I just never saw that with crypto. Yeah, so I think the lesson there's truly understand if the value is real versus like the sounds really cool or you think a lot of, like, would you want it? I think it's a nice exercise there. We pick on poor Elon, but like, you know, I feel like with a lot of his products, at least he, you know, he's got lots of other issues, but like, he articulates clear user value even in the beginning when he's hyping things up.

23:55Like Tesla's, right? Like, okay, so electric cars weren't ready. He did the roadsters like whatever, but like, he at least articulated this idea that like, we're going to put a lot of batteries in these things that are going to really be real cars. They're going to have a real range. We're going to figure out the charging problems. Like, you know, that like, as an end user, I'm like, okay, that's great. Like, now I have a car that works like a car that solves some problems that's way cheaper to operate because the fuel is cheaper. Like, he's solving all the end user problems for me. Like that at least makes sense.

24:22Even if you don't believe that he's going to do it or, you know, believe in the way he did it. Like, at least the end user value proposition makes sense. You have this other great quote in your newsletter. People are lazy, look beyond cool to, on how much easier your tool or tech makes someone's life convenient, so he's wins. You talk about that, just this realization, people are just lazy and that's the key. Yeah, well, that, I mean, that is the thing. Like, I think we, I think as product builders, you know, it's hard to not love what you're doing. Like, you build a product because you love it.

24:53You build it because you understand some problem. You know, you build it because you want to paycheck, maybe sometimes, but like, you know, we build it for all these reasons that just do not matter to the end user at all. And like, if there's one thing I've learned about product, you know, particularly in consumer space, just kind of in general, is like, people are just lazy about stuff and like, don't care about anything other than it making their life there. The thing that's complicated with that is, there's two things about it that I think are interesting, that they follow from that principle.

25:20One is, like, I think products almost follow these, like, throw in dynamic rules. We're like, if you add a little bit of value, your adoption goes slowly, and if you add a lot of value, your adoption goes really quickly, right? I think Chatshipit is a great recent example of something that was just like added a ton of new value to the world and like got this explosive growth. And then you see lots of other AI stuff that people are doing that's just like, not bad, but not great, and it's sort of kind of adding a little bit of value and kind of slowly, you know, longer and longer, or maybe it's kind of collapse in her way.

25:52That's kind of the, you know, one thing about the users are lazy, part of this. And then the other one, I think, is, again, it's almost like physics. I kind of think of this as entropy, or people who are confused about entropy or will be like, entropy's not real, like it runs backwards all the time on Earth, like life gets more complicated. Like what is the deal with entropy? And like, well, no, you have to consider the whole system, right? The entire system of the solar system, including the sun is increasing entropy all the time. We're just making use of some of it. And I think the same thing is kind of true about user laziness.

26:26We're like, people are like, this tiny thing that I'm focusing on, this feature that I added is better. Therefore, users should adopt it, but you forget all the stuff around it, like the user has to hear about it. The user has to remember it in the moment. The user has to learn how to use it. They have to build the habit. Like, that's all effort, right? Not to mention the fact that like, the actual use of your feature might have friction on the way in, right? It might be hard to sign up for it. When we did rightly at the beginning, we didn't even ask for an email address because it was such a novel thing.

26:56We didn't want any friction at all in the onboarding process. So you could just come in and make a document and start using it without telling us anything at all about yourself. And after about two minutes of typing, if you're still there, we'd very gently just say, please give us your email address. Nope, password, no, anything. Just give us your email address. So we can send you a URL of this document in case you care about it later. Because if you leave, we'll never know where, we'll never really find it again. So we were super focused on that. Like, as little friction as possible. And I think it's well known in the consumer space.

27:30You don't have the number of seconds you have is not many, like 15 seconds, 30 seconds, right? To convince somebody that there's some value there. They're not gonna like hang out and grind their way through a bunch of high friction stuff to sign up for your thing. Like, that's the other part of it. It's just like, users will only adopt what you're doing. If that sum total of energy that they have to expend is less than the resulting ease in their life that they get usually by a factor of at least a couple. So it has to make your life a lot better. Hopefully a lot better, like 10X better than what you spend to use it.

28:10What I think of as you're describing this is accept Microsoft Excel at a billion toolbars and buttons and options, which allowed Google Docs essentially to come in with a much simpler experience. Now you're on the other side of that, which is I never, I didn't think about. Yeah, it's a really funny place to be. Like, you know, I did, like, and it's funny to be at Microsoft because I'm kind of the enemy, right? It's like I'm the guy who like messed them up a little bit. So there's some friction around that. Yeah, I mean, I think there are similar tradeoffs to be made right now, by the way, with AI, I think there's a similar opportunity.

28:42But we made this choice with, so it's a little harder, remember, right? Because it's like 18 years, 17 years ago now, 18 years ago, almost. Like, you know, in that era, like office was impregnable, right? Like so software had to be distributed physically, right? Had to be shipped around, had to be bought and installed. It was like hard to use. And so there's a very high transactional cost because there's a very high transactional cost. The buyers would always make this decision like, do I want the thing with 1 ,000 features or the thing with 995 features? I don't know if those last five are, but I might as well have all of them.

29:15And so like, you know, that was just like the lock in for Microsoft, right? So we made this trade offer like, look, we're easy to use. We're zero install. You don't have to ever deal with it. It's super convenient. Plus you get this one new feature that's really, really useful, which is collaborating with each other and not having to send attachments around the file system, file servers. But, you know, we're going to take away most of the features because we don't care about them that much. And we took away a little bit more than we should have. Like, in the early days, we get all these complaints about people who want WordCount, which I thought was a really weird, I thought that was going to be like, way at the end of the list.

29:50I thought like, we didn't have a rulers. Like we didn't have any kind of formatting at that point. Any kind of real pagination, we just had like these basic documents, but page count, or WordCount came in. Of course, it was students, who's one of our early adopters. So they really wanted to know if they were at the WordCount for the essay that they had just had assigned to them. So there was this dance with Microsoft that we deliberately made this trade off. And I think it's kind of all. It's almost like a classic innovator's Dona model, right? Like we took this, you know, the other incumbent that was like asymptotically approaching, you know, useful as like they're adding stuff.

30:23Whenever they added stuff, it wasn't really that much more valuable. And then, you know, we were this like small thing that came in to a market that they didn't care that much about, that they didn't understand that well, which is the internet stuff. It's kind of this disruptive new thing. We just kind of chipped away from the bottom, like, you know, the innovator's Dona. And it was, I think it was hard for Microsoft to respond to. I think it took them a while to even have a, like a clear idea of how they were going to respond to it. And we're expecting they did fine. Like we took a bunch of market share, but they kept all the money, basically.

30:52So, you know, we being Google, like, you know, so like they survived it. Like, you know, they survived, they did a good job surviving the challenge. Like it's, you know, we have all the users now, but they have all the money. Like, we have all the money I guess now. I want to spend more time on Google docs and the story there. A couple of questions. How long did it take from starting on it to feeling like it's working, like whatever you consider product markets fit? Almost immediately, honestly. Like it's, it was weird. Like the, the process of it was, I had this idea, we set this thing up, we started working together.

31:26We're like, ah, that's actually pretty, so we basically like the history is like, I noticed content editable. So like the browser would do some editing for you. And then I noticed JavaScript, like it never realized JavaScript is out there. And like we had done word processors in the past, this team and like for a long time. In fact, like my co -founder Steve, the other person on that document, like wrote this thing called Fullrite way back in like 1987 or something like that. That was like a direct competitor, 85, I think even though it was like a direct competitor to word one. So like we knew word processors, and so we decided to just like try it, like what's it like to build a word processor.

32:02And like the fact that you could collaborate on them was kind of an accident. Like there's just like these things on the server, we hadn't built the thing that would lock somebody out yet. So there was just like, here's a document, like you can edit these two things, which we have, you know, A immediately realized was really cool. Like we could both work in the same document at the same time. And then B realized like a crap, like we're colliding with each other because there's no presence or anything like that. And there's no collusion detection or anything like that. So like, so pretty quickly, that's kind of cool.

32:29Like that feels good as a development team to have like these shared documents not to send stuff around and not like, so that's cool. So let's build that out by like, oh, bummer, like collaborations, a problem, like we'll have to go fix that. And like naively like figured out that like, that's a problem. It took forever to get that working out. It was really, really hard at the time because we didn't have, we didn't do operational transform. I don't think that technique had been quite invented yet. And so we did three way merge, which doesn't work that well for the browsers. The logical document of a document can be rendered differently in HTML, there's not a canonical representation.

33:04And so you're doing merges where like, alphabetization can change, the order of attributes can change, the tree structure can change. Like, you know, Firefox would do a blank paragraph with a singleton, the art tag, and IE would do it. It's like open closed paragraph tag. And so like, you know, even the tree doesn't match. And like, so it's a really hard merge problem. So that turned out to be like a naively hard problem to solve. But like, once we had seen the value of like working together, we were motivated to do that. Kind of the interesting thing too with that is, like, I think if we'd gotten it in the other order, we might not have done it.

33:40Like, it's a good, another good example of why not, and what if, right? We're like, we got really lucky that we saw the what if part, that we saw how cool like a document in a browser that you can collaborate on would be. Because if we understood how hard the collaboration piece would have been first, without understanding that value, we might have been like, it's not worth it. Like, it's going to be so hard to solve that problem. It's probably not a useful app. So I think it's a good little counter example of like, that optimistic, pessimistic perspective we were talking about. Like, you know, we could easily have missed that idea, easily have missed that idea.

34:13And we just got lucky, I think, in the order that presented to us. That is really interesting actually, that you need to be pulled to the what if, getting you so excited that you're going to spend, however many years it took you to solve that problem. What? Because you are so excited about this. Yeah, yeah. That's really good. That's what, I mean, I've spent a lot of time, it's kind of like, do you know, I keep expecting people to be like, all right, grandpa, stop talking about you, do you know, X has been a long time. Like, so it has been a long time. It's been 17 years and like, but it's still very relevant.

34:42It's got a couple of billion users now, I think. Like, it's a big thing. But I've spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years, you know, just thinking about like, what, why did that work? Like, what worked about that? Like, what lessons can I draw from it? Like, it was, it was, there was a lot of energy around it, positive and negative. Like, the first week I was at Google, like, an executive there refused to give me hardware. Because he thought that Google was an app company, not it, it was a search company, not an app company. And like, literally, like, the guy in charge of hardware at the time, like, refused to give me hardware for this service.

35:14And I had to threaten to either suit him or haul him in front of Eric Schmidt, because I had a contract and a contract had to earn out. And like, you know, so like, that was, again, another one of these interesting lessons that like, sometimes the opposition is enormous. And like, you know, if I had just been like a random Google employee with this idea and no legal protection in the CEO wasn't, you know, a fan of the project, it would have died. Like, there's no way it would have made it through that negativity and that pessimism and that, you know, that person being either challenged or afraid of the idea or just not able to imagine it or what, I'm not sure what.

35:48But like, we'll keep coming back to this idea of optimism, but like, I have this very strong feeling about that. Like, most of the reason people don't do good, really innovative, good products is this kind of mindset. Like, you're just not seeing opportunities. There's a lot of hard work for sure. There's a lot of stuff that you can read about and best practices of doing iteration and user testing and user interviews and really listening and, you know, all the engineering best practices. That stuff is pretty mechanical. Like, once you know where you're going, you can do that. It's not that hard to learn and to master it.

36:21I think the hard stuff is this mindset of like, being open in the right ways and understanding that some, some kinds of pushback are good pushback, some are bad. I always think that like, product builders and entrepreneurs, you have this really hard problem of like, you have to be, you know, very rigid about your mission. Like, I know where I'm going. I know what my mission is and like, I'm going to go there because the world doesn't care where it's going to push back. But you also have to be really flexible about feedback. Like, you might not be, you probably aren't going to be right about a bunch of it.

36:52And so like, you have to like, blend these two things together somehow. Like, you know, it's like a samurai sword that's like hard on the back, but it's off to run the edge so it doesn't break. And like, it's never that other way around. But like, you know, it's like, this is hard thing you have to do as an entrepreneur and I think it's like the real core of building really great products is like finding that balance and really listening to those signals being open to it. And also knowing how long to commit to it versus time to move on to something else. So along those lines, what was the moment where you finally felt product market fit for what became Google Docs?

37:27And how long was that from the beginning of starting to work on it? It depends on what market we're talking about. Like, I've been continually surprised at the adoption of G Docs. I think, we knew there was something there pretty quickly, like probably in the first couple of months, like there was a lot of energy around it. Like, we wanted to, that is a weird ride because like we built this thing kind of on a whim and, you know, as an experiment, we liked it. We decided to go just advertise on Google. At the time, 37 signals was kind of like the cool company. And we're like, that looks cool. Like, we'll just be some engineers and we'll have like a little subscription SaaS business thing and like chill out.

38:02So let's see what it costs to acquire customers. So like, let's go advertise on Google and see how much it costs. So like get people to sort of show up and then we'll figure out if we have a subscription business or not. And that just got us noticed. Like that got us noticed by Google, it got us noticed we were like, I think like one of the first 10 articles at TechCrunch, like Michael Ergerton, like there's another funny, rightly stories that like we had, I had a breakfast with Michael Ergerton at bucks in that era where he was like trying to decide, he had this like spreadsheet idea he wanted to work on.

38:31And he was trying to decide, just go do that and like maybe join forces with us because we were cool. Or if he should like continue to work on this blog thing, he had gone called TechCrunch. And like, so I might be partially responsible for TechCrunch because we turned him down and say he should go to TechCrunch instead. You know, every time I bump into him, I was laugh about that one. But like when that, when we got noticed, like we really got noticed, there was just this period where we're like the hot thing for a couple months, like where every VC wanted to talk to us and everyone's trying to figure it out.

39:00Cause I think we're like, you know, when you see one point online like Gmail, which came before us, like, oh, that's kind of cool. That's an interesting quasi app, but it's like a weird kind of app. It's like serialized. You can't really interact with that much. And then you see this as like another point on the curve and you're like, oh, that's a real app. Like, oh crap, like I wonder, you know, is there anything stopping us from doing the rest of office? Oh, probably not. Like how far is this gonna go? With, you know, so like I think we were that second point that like showed that there was actually this totally different paradigms.

39:33So we just got like this enormous amount of tension pretty quickly. And then the rest of us like feeling our way through like what does it actually mean? Like how much of it, how much of the functionality do you need to build? What's the really important part about it? How much of its collaboration where you get spent a bunch of energy on offline, which was miserable, which never turned out to matter that much. You know, now that team has spent a long time like replicating all these features that we abandoned by the wayside, which I think I'm not that interested in. I think the future of documents looks very different than what we have now.

40:02I think it's kind of funny now that we're spending billions of dollars on GPUs to emulate WinPulp and Ink pressed by metal type. Like we're building linear documents that are fixed, that are static. So like one of the things we've been doing with these chatbot things is they're also, they also serve as documents. Like say bots are docs all the time. And so like you'll do these things where like you, I do this all the time and like we'll interview, have one that we'll create a new one as a, it has a separate identity as a separate document. And then you tell it like I'm gonna write a technical document.

40:33Here's roughly what it's about. Why don't you interview me? So interview's here for an hour. And now you got this nice like linear artifact, which you can read. It's very readable because it's conversational. But at the same time you've been building all these like semantically encoded for traumatic memories in this, in the specter database. So you can come in and say like, show me a diagram of this, draw this diagram for me. Change it in the following way. Like what is, what is this? If I change this, what if I change that? Summarize this part of it. So you can start to interact with it. That's still like a creating stuff at the bottom of this linear artifact.

41:05But the next step that we're working on now is just making that dynamic where you just like come to something and you talk to it and interact with it. I think one of the things that's gonna happen is, you know, just like it seems, well in the early days of G -OX, like people would say like, well what if I'm not connected? And one of the things I would say is like, in three or five years, if you get handed a device that's not connected to the internet, your word for it is going to be broken, which is true, right? Like it's anachronistic and weird if something's not connected. I think we're gonna feel the same way about intention and interactivity in our products very soon.

41:39Like if I can't tell something, what my intent is and have it configure itself, and then tell it's in a way, have it conversed with me, whether that's a device or a piece of GUI, you know, UX somewhere, like I think that's, like it's gonna feel anachronistic. It's gonna feel really weird. There's like that scene in one of the early Star Trek movies, where Scotty tries to talk to the mouse, right? He's like computer and like make the transfer, like he's pissed off because he can't talk to the computer. Like we're all gonna be like that in like five years, I think, about around, and it's gonna seem really weird that we have these applications that like, you know, I can't collaborate with the application.

42:13Like why can't I collaborate with the applications? Like it's like the applications locked on a file server, just like the pre -goo GDoc stays. Like why can't I just like interact with it and have it configure itself the way I want to configure itself and like show me the data the way I want to see this. And I mean build the workflow the way I want it. Remember it for me and bring it back later and you know all that stuff. So that was a long day direction, but I was just like, you know, you're kind of asking about features and functionality. And I feel like where we are now with these like feature wars, it's just silly.

42:39Like it's just, it's not the point at all. Like I think documents are gonna change radically in the next few years. I want to follow that thread before I do. I found the first TechCrunch Post about you guys starts with Imagine Word, but is an Ajax browser application? Yeah, they're, yeah, Ajax. What's the even JavaScript or is Ajax? Ajax, so hot back then. It's also funny too, because like I'll talk to young friend and developers these days, I'm like, I don't want to scare you too much, but like JQuery didn't even exist when I wrote this thing. You know, this is like bare metal in the DOM and there were bugs.

43:12Like when I went to Google, like I had to write this, little network stack at the bottom of the JavaScript that like in TheoryXMiles .tv, you could interrupt, you could have multiple requests and fly and you could interrupt them and discard them and stuff. But the stack at the time was really buggy and I think it was iE. And so I wrote this little like network queue that would like keep track of whether there were requests in flight and like kill them in a way that didn't break everything. And you know, it was hard to do like, because it's this weird asynchronous programming. And that piece of code when I went to Google, they made me reformat it for the JavaScript readability standards and I could not get it to work with their formatting.

43:51Like there was some bug in the JavaScript compiler of the time that like white space mattered. And so I wound up like checking it in, broken, got the readability badge and immediately fixed it. And so like that was another one of our little, a little hacks to get this working. I love it. This episode is brought to you by Atrefs. Many of you already know Atrefs as one of the top tools for search engine optimization. It's used by thousands of SEOs and companies like IBM, Adidas and eBay. What you may not know is that there's a free version that was made with small website owners in mind. It's called Atrefs Webmaster Tools.

44:27It's free and it can help you bring more traffic to your website. Atrefs Webmaster Tools will show you keywords that you rank for and backlinks that you can get. It also performs automated site audits to find what issues prevent your website from ranking higher on Google. Every detected issue comes with the detailed explanation and advice on how to fix it. Visit attrefs .com slash AWT. Set up a free account, connect your website and start improving it. That's ahrfs .com slash AWT. There's often this criticism as an engineer, you just want to work on interesting things and work on the technology before you find a problem that it's solving.

45:06It feels like with this example, it was, you just think this is a cool technology. Let's see what happens. Do you have any learnings or advice for when it's actually fine? Let's just play with this tech. Be at the edge as you said and maybe to lead somewhere versus like, you should probably try to avoid that and first focus on a problem. I'm guilty of that. I mean, I like to play with stuff. Like I tend to think with my fingers as much as anything else. So I actually think there's a good place for just play with, play with the tech a lot and like figure out what it's good for. What I've evolved to doing these days with my teams is, I'll just like, I pick what I call North Stars that I think are like interesting useful things to get to rather than just messing around.

45:46Like what's a cool thing that I think might be buildable with this is. So right now we're doing these multi -agent systems or trying to figure out how much independent work they can do without a person holding their hand. And so a nice domain to test that out in is programming because you don't have a whole lot of like, you just like give something a Python environment to file system and that's it and like, that's all it needs. And so you're not like distracted by connectivity issues or whatever. So one of the problems right now is like, go right in the eye in Python. Like, you know, that's a problem I could give you an intern and it would take them a summer to do some halfway decent job of it.

46:19It's a thing you could expect a reasonably competent programmer to do mostly independently. And so like it should be possible for like, this system if it's independent at all to go do that. So is that useful by itself? No, because we already have the eye, it doesn't matter. But like if we build a system of programming agents that can self -monitor and self -correct and bug themselves, that can build things that are roughly that scale of complexity, that's valuable. Like that would be a valuable thing to have. And it's kind of interesting too because like that system already, it's produced a bunch of good insights.

46:48One of them is it's kind of complicated and hard to debug it. It's this asynchronous system of stochastic agents. That's a lot of stuff to kind of deal with. So we wrote a debugger agent. And debugger agent watches stuff and like when there's a problem somewhere, it goes and figures out what the problem is and then gives you a nice explanation of like, what you broke and what needs to be fixed. And like we haven't turned it loose on actually fixing things yet because you don't trust it. But you know, like it's like very helpful as an assistant, it's there and it's there. So we had one that documented itself too.

47:17That's the other one that we did recently. It just turned it loose on documenting the code base and did a pretty good job of it. So like it's starting to produce interesting stuff, right? Because we have these North Star's we aim things at. And I think that's maybe a good antidote to this. Like just playing, you know, just playing with tech without being focused doesn't tend to produce anything that's super valuable. But picking these kind of, even if they're kind of arbitrary goals as long as they're real goals that you're trying to get to, that's useful, right? Or you're like, I wonder if I can get this to work.

47:46Like, you know, I wonder if I can build this thing. I grind away at that for a week and see how close I can get to see what I learn about why it's hard. That's probably better than just like, let me poke a JavaScript for. It's also different, I think, at a bigger company where you need to achieve something versus I think as just an engineer at a college, just playing around. Like, you know, go for it, right? It's just like, that's the worst thing that can happen. Even that early days of rightly, the very, I mean, we had a goal from the beginning. The beginning was like, can I write a word processor in the browser?

48:15Like that was literally the problem statement, right? It was like, I have content editable. I have Ajax or JavaScript. Like, can I put these together in something that feels like a word processor? Like, let's go do that. It's, you know, it's kind of half messing around with tech, but it's also half like an actual goal, like an actual goal. So I don't know. Like, I think that's, I like playing around. I think a lot of the good product that he has most of the good product that he has actually come up from engineering. So I think there's a lot to be said for, you know, get familiar with tools, particularly like weird esoteric combinations of tools can all often be useful.

48:49Like, if you understand two or three things, like I'm at Google, like, I was one of only two people in the company with code readability, which is like the right to check in code in this language. In both a back end language, which is the monitoring language, or mod, a middle tier language, which is Java and a front language, which is JavaScript. Like, no one else would do that full stack. I think it's useful to have like that broad perspective sometimes. Sam the Renaissance man of all languages. ADD more like it, but yeah, I think it's much of the things. I wanted to follow this thread a little further around being good at these what if questions.

49:27It feels like you've built this, or maybe you're born with this skill of thinking in the future, thinking about what's possible, thinking about where things are going. Is there anything that you could recommend to people listening to get better at the skill? Because for a lot of product people, this is really important to figure out where could we be going and let's work back. This is a really interesting question. I'm like, I may actually write, I've been thinking about writing a book that's from some of my Sunday letters, and this is maybe the frame of it, so I'm curious to see how fling day get from saying this will be interesting to see.

49:57I think there's like this weird thing that I've noticed, I go talk to university kids and stuff like that, and there's this weird thing I noticed where, when I was in the university and I would talk to old guys, like me, they would all say the PC is this stupid toy, whatever, it's not real computing, go on a mainframe or whatever. And my attitude was out of the way old man, just like you're relevant, I'm gonna go do this thing, it's awesome, go go go. And now when I talk to kids, I actually had a slide up at Michigan, I was talking recently that was titled, okay, Numer, that one of the professor actually put it up there.

50:28Because the generation is very pessimistic and doesn't seem to be quite as engaged and energetic about solving problems. And I've been puzzling through it, and I think maybe there's like a bunch of different things that kind of intersect. I think one of them is, I think they all have to do with the willingness to take risk and to fail, honestly. I think that's really where it comes from. So I think there's like, you see a lot of filtered content, and if that filtered content presents low probability events, like five and six sigma events, as though they were normal. So you see like everybody makes $100 million, and they're start up in the first three months.

51:02Like so if your startup isn't making $100 million, you're an idiot. Like there's that stuff. There's also your living out loud. So like in winning fail in that context, it feels very painful. But I think there's also like, you know, for elite students, like who, you know, people at these elite schools, they're hard to get into. I went to Michigan, because you're kind of smart. Michigan's a good school you live nearby, go apply to that one. Like, you know, nothing, nothing serious about it. But like kids in the elite schools, like their lives are highly curated going up to getting into a school like that now, right?

51:32Like those students, like, I didn't do sports. I didn't do extracurricular. I was just like a weird nerd at, you know, having to be good at math. And so I think there's that as well. Like if you're highly curated, where you spent a lot of your life thinking, everything I do has to have a reason and an output. It's very hard to just mess around and do something that might, you know, lead down a surprising path, right? So that's the curation is part of it. And then I think just like, you know, in about the mid 80s, when I graduated from high school, we stopped letting kids just play on their own unsupervised outside with other kids.

52:07Like I grew up in this neighborhood full of, it was like the faculty ghetto for this small university, my dad taught at. And like, we just went around wild. It was like on the state of the widow of Dodge Motor, founder of Dodge Motor, so we had like a couple hundred acres of swamp and fields to go around around. And we did hair -raising like dangerous things that my parents never knew about and like really explored and had fun. I think like if you put all those pieces together, I think like there's much less of an ability and willingness and skill set about around experimenting to the point of failure, like making fool of yourself, like having bad ideas.

52:41I send like stupid emails to Sacha at Microsoft all the time. And I'm just like, I don't know what the hell he thinks of me at this point because I send him all these new ideas. I think he actually like gets it and he's like, he likes it because I don't think people usually do that for him. But I'm just like, man, this is, you know, send him an email like a week later. I'm like, yeah, that was a dumb idea. Sorry about that. You know, like I've decided that wasn't a very good one. But I think like, you know, you just have, like you cannot dance if you can't, if you're, you know, afraid to embarrass yourself.

53:10You cannot succeed if you're afraid to fail. Like there's just, that's just how it is. You have to have that sense of play. You have to have that sense of, you know, it's okay if this doesn't work, I'll iterate on it. I have this personal motto, which is like, from error comes virtue because I'm a maker, I make stuff and I fuck it up all the time. Like I, I, I, I poor motor skills. So I make mistakes constantly and then I just like figure out how to make the mistake into virtue somehow. So like, I think it's a really good skill to have. Like I, I, it's a saying I took on this year and I really, really like it is.

53:43Like I never had a personal motto before. I think it might be my personal motto. I think virtue from error. Amazing. On this topic of failing, I think a lot of people hear this advice and they're like, yeah, okay, I need to fail more. It's hard to do and oftentimes your performance as a company is negatively impacted is, and it feels like for you, it was just having, you've done it enough times or you find, okay, it's gonna be fine. I'm not just saying no one cares. I email Satya this thing, he ignores it or he doesn't. Like it's gonna be okay. Is that maybe the key to this? Or is there anything else that you've done to allow you to be okay with failure?

54:17I think there's this, I feel like you can have a linear return on your effort if you manage things in a linear way, which is I think that managing, tightly managing, okay, nothing's gonna be surprising. I'm a view within this boundary. I'm gonna kind of slowly or create value. I'm gonna play this game, whatever. I think you can have a nice linear boring return to your career and climb the ladder and take 30 years and whatever. I don't have the patience for that. And I think the way you get extraordinary returns is you do extraordinary things, right? You have to take bigger risks and have more and more interesting shots to have this kind of extraordinary result in your career.

54:57I feel like I always tell people like I think, I mean, I pitch this because I've observed myself and thought about what has been successful in my career. It's not a thing everybody can do. I've just kind of like this. I'm never really fully grew up. I'm kind of this weirdo. I still feel, I'm 57 now. I feel like I'm about 17. I'm still pretty mature and like to mess around with stuff and play with things. So not everybody can do it, but I think there's like, at the end of the day, the reason you get ahead in your career is because you had a lot of impact. And the reason you had a lot of impact was because you picked something that you're good at that you did with a lot of intensity that wound up having impact, right?

55:39And so I think the good at part of it is hard to, like we tend to undervalue the things we're good at. We tend to think work has to be unpleasant. And so something is easy and fun. We don't tend to think it's very valuable. So I think lots of people gravitate in this direction of like let's go do unpleasant things and grind our way through the career because like that's the way to like make it. But the reality is like you should go do the thing that you feel guilty to get paid for it. There's a thing like that and do the hell out of it, right? Like do it as hard as you can. If you get pleasure from doing something that people want to pay you for, do it the best you can do it.

56:13It's hard as you can do it. And if that's messing around and playing around with cool ideas, like do the hell out of that, like that work doesn't necessarily have to be hard. It often is, but it doesn't have to be. And the best case is that it is the most impact you'll ever have is where you're in that mode or you're just like in the flow and you know, doing your thing and you're happy to do it and you can't quite believe they pay you. And you don't understand how you're getting away with this but it's super cool anyway. Sorry, like I think that's the, that's the career thing that makes sense to me.

56:40And at least that's what I've done. You know, who knows? Like it's all luck sometimes. So it's hard to replicate these. Everybody has a different path. Amazing, I love that advice. It's exactly where I was gonna take our conversation. So I love that you took us there. It makes me just be think of, I'm reading Charlie Munger's Almanac which just came out through Stray Press and Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger's whole philosophy is when you find an advantage, just go huge, just go big. Like, right, like make one better year but when you find that, go for it. Don't like buy a little bit at a time.

57:15And I love that that's exactly what you're saying. Sometimes things don't make sense either. Like I'll, so I'll lean over and like show you for people with the video. That's an instrument I made. It's an instrument. So the top of that's a piece of redwood. This one right behind with the cat eyes. The reason it's got these weird cat eyes, by the way, this is virtue from error right there. Like I dug this piece of wood out of the forest. It had been sitting on the forest for four for 80 years, trying to not rot and doing a pretty good job at cause it's redwood. And there were knots in it. So those two cat eyes were the knots where there's another knot like right here that I couldn't get out.

57:48But like, now there's two knots in there that I had to carve out of there. That's a very weird design that I did by hand. It doesn't quite work. It's kind of a failure. The arch of it's a little bit too high. So it's a little hard to play because the pick hits the top because the strings get a little closer to the top. So like that, but like, yeah, that's an experiment. That was playing around. I kind of wanted to do this thing. It was fun to do. Like it's a passion project. Now it's just hanging in the wall. You know, like nothing, not everything works. Like, you know, clearly I don't have a career as a luthier either.

58:16So it's more just a fun thing to do. But that's just like a good example of like, I don't know, sometimes I don't even understand why I do stuff. You just do it because you do it because it makes some sense to you. Many people are kind of in the opposite boat where they don't like what they're doing. They're miserable, but they have to have a job. They need income. They need to pay their rent, be their family. I know, I realize what I'm saying is very privileged. Like I'm sorry about that, but like from some perspective. But I imagine you were also in those situations occasionally. Is there anything you recommend to folks that aren't in that like I would do this for free.

58:45I'm so accepted about this work. Because do you recommend try to get out of that as soon as you can? Is it enjoyed as much as you can? I mean, I mean, I've done plenty of things for money. Like I've done plenty of jobs to make money for my family. Like things I did not enjoy doing. All I can say is really like I stopped doing those things as soon as I could stop doing them. Not only is as fast as I physically could because I definitely had that Calvinist oldest boy thing of like must provide, must suffer kind of thing. So it took me a long time to realize like, no, actually like I'm really creative.

59:19I don't have to be like everybody else. I can have my own path. And like, you know, I can be this weird engineer. I was joking. I'm like an engineer like two is prime number. It's like a kind of a programmer, but not real like him. This weird non -linear person that only barely fits in the programming world. But like, you know, it's okay. Like I took me a long time to figure out that I could do that that I could be comfortable with that part of myself. And like, I'm fortunate enough now that I've done enough things and I have enough of a connection network that people understand who I am and the value I can bring.

59:49And so I get away with doing that stuff that I like doing that I'm. So like it is kind of privileged, you know, advice. And it's not something everybody can do at every stage in their career. Certainly earlier stages, you often have to make compromises. But I still think it's worth paying attention to, right? When you're working, like what makes you happy? What is the stuff that you feel guilty for getting away with? Like when I started managing people, I couldn't understand why people were paying me and I wasn't writing code. Because all of my energy was attached to like, I can produce a lot of lines of code every day.

1:00:20And then, and you know, I asked my boss at the time, like, why are you so happy with this? Like I'm not writing anything. He's like, I don't know what you're doing. Like, wherever you go gets better. So like just keep doing whatever it is you're doing. And like, you know, that was like one of these moments where I was just like, oh, I could do something else. And it's kind of fun. I like talking to people all day. Like that's great. They were going to pay me for talking to people all day. You know, if they seem happy, I'm happy. Let me just like lean into this for a while and see where it goes.

1:00:44Like so I think you just like, look for those moments. Like when somebody is willing to let you do something that you feel happy to do, surprisingly happy to do, like doesn't feel like it's the thing you quote unquote, should be doing. If you get those surprises like this, I think this goes back to this openness, the optimism that we're talking about. You have to be receptive, you know, a 10 of those moments when they show up. So I think they're there in every career if you listen for them. Like you will see stuff show up where, you know, you don't think of it as who you are, but somebody else sees it in you.

1:01:17And you know, if you can be open to it, you can do these pivots. When you talk about that, that makes me think of Seth Godin has this really important advice that's always stuck with me that no matter what job you're in, just try to enjoy it and do the best version of that job you can because you'll enjoy it more, you'll end up being more successful. And it's just a good habit to just like, I'm just gonna do the best I can of being a waitress at this place. I'm just gonna do the best of greeting people entering the Apple Store. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Like I think, you know, or even more than that, just like find a way to bring yourself to it.

1:01:53Right? Like what is the thing that you can do in this role that is unique to you that you're comfortable with? Right? You know, that like where you really have high impact. I don't know, I tend to be very, like it's kind of a joke because I'm a programmer. I tend to be a very binary person. Right? I'm like, either all in or all out on something. So whenever I do something, I do it. It's just a ridiculous amount of intensity for better or worse. So, you know, like I find the ways to do stuff. I tend to be very unhappy if I can't be intense in something successfully. And then if I can be intense in it successfully, I'm happier and the people around me are probably less happy, but like stuff happens.

1:02:33Anyways, I get things done. Speaking of getting things done and being intense and working things that are really interesting, you're responsible for some of the cutting edge work happening at Microsoft in AI. You're spending a lot of time in AI. I'm curious to get your take on just what you find interesting where you think things are going, what people should know about AI. I'll share a couple quotes that you put out somewhere that I have here that I think are cool. One is AI isn't a feature of your product. Your product is a feature of AI. I love that one, yeah. Another is it'll be possible to add some value by building AI into your product, but really transformative massive value will come from building apps and solutions that won't work at all without it, that tree did as a true platform.

1:03:14Yeah, I think both of those are really, are really true. So I'm like, what I'm working on is, most of the industry right now is focused on, when you talk about somebody who's working in AI, it's somebody who's creating models. Somebody who's figuring out how to do some new open source model or somebody who's doing some new training or make some model bigger. And I think that's very, it's valid useful work. It's just not the kind of work I like to do very much. And a lot of people are doing it. And so I'm an app builder, I'm a tool builder, and so I don't create models I consume them. I want to build things around them.

1:03:46And so when I started with Microsoft, started working on GP4 with Microsoft in September of last year, my immediate reaction to it after the picking my jaw up off the floor, which we were all doing in the early days was, okay, this is cool, but in some computer science sense, it's just this function, this stochastic pure function, it just takes a character array and rearranges it and hands it back to you. That's not much of a building block for building programs. We need state and we need control flow and orchestration and call out. It's like that just kind of started me down this rabbit hole of thinking about building the semantic kernel, which we built and then building the infinite chatbot, which was next and these other projects we've been working on.

1:04:30And like more I think about this stuff, more I do think like those two quotes are good quotes. Like I think what's gonna happen over time, I actually think we're at the beginning of this gigantic disruption in the software industry. I think the way that the internet made distribution of information free, I think AI is gonna make pixels free. So pixels are expensive to produce now. Like they take programmers and they take lots of infrastructure and like putting a pixel on front of the user is a hard thing to do and lots of software is predicated on that, lots of businesses. The way lots of business were predicated on it being hard to distribute information 25 years ago.

1:05:05But like you can see this already with things like just images, right? Like you know, two years ago if you wanted a piece of digital art, you had to go invent Photoshop, learn to use Photoshop, use Photoshop to do the drawing, like build the skills up. Like that's a lot of work to produce those pixels. Now it's like I want a picture of a cat riding a bike eating a banana like done, right? Like so those pixels got really free. But in that similar things are happening in the business world as well. And I think it's just gonna start to happen everywhere. So you can draw like this is what if? Like let's go ask some what ifs.

1:05:35So what if the agents get really, what if the models get really good at planning? So they get more independent, they can do longer complicated things. What if the multimodal stuff gets really good so that they can both consume and produce dynamic UI? Like I was talking about, what if we figure out a good way to store state? This is my bots or docs thing. So like what if what if we figure out a good way for you to like really highly personalize something? So it knows you really well and you trust it with confidential information. If you have all those things, you're just gonna spend a lot of time talking to that agent.

1:06:04Like it's like, you know, what would you do? If you imagine you're like the richest person in the world and you've got 100 or the best people working for you and a chief of staff and their tireless and they never fight with each other to do everything you want. Like with that staff supporting you, like what are you doing with software? Like how much time what are you doing when you're sitting in front of a screen where you're probably communicating intention and you're probably consuming some in either entertainment or some of the products of that intent? And that's about it. You're not like messing around with like, Poke static apps and stuff that doesn't work right.

1:06:34You're just telling your staff to deal with stuff for you. So I think that's kind of where we're headed. I think in the world of software at least, you know, things are gonna get more dynamic, more intentional, more semantic, more fluid, more personalized. I think there's a ton of problems to be solved to make that vision real. But I think, you know, this feels to me a little bit like seeing the palm maybe or the early iPhone. We were just like, okay, I get it. Like we're going, you know, phones are gonna get interesting. Like that's a new device. Now we gotta do a whole bunch of engineering before they actually are like as useful as they are today.

1:07:08Right? So I think I get it. Like I think software is going to change radically now. I decide the same feeling when I, when we started doing this, going back to G -Docs again, it's another lesson. Like it's another one of these categories shifts. Like the second we got, right, we up on its feet, and I was like, ah, the browser is actually a platform that you can actually build real apps in. Like I get it. Like the world's gonna change. And we had a ton of stuff to do, right? Like nobody really understood distributed systems. Nobody understood how to build stuff in multiple places at once. Or you know, how do you deal with replication?

1:07:39How do you use security? Like all kinds of hard -pro, all the development patterns had to shift from waterfall to agile to CICD. Like all this stuff had to change to like fully realize that world. But like I remember back in 2005, like you know, this very quick, and like the people who were like the strong proponents, I think all saw this. Like instantly saw that the world had changed. And like there's this new category. And I have exactly the same feeling about GenreVay. Like yep, software's gonna totally change. Like these businesses are gonna totally change. I might take 10 years to like really work through all of it.

1:08:11But like yep, like door open, new room, like new game, like filling, start coloring in the blanks, right? Like, you know, let's go. So I bet that's where I think we're going. And you know, that sounded really certain. It's probably sounded more certain than I should sound. I think there's a lot of probably a quarter at least, if not a half of what I just said is wrong in some way. So like we're gonna learn a bunch of stuff along the way. And there's a lot of work to do. Like a whole lot of work to do and a whole lot of unanticipated side effects are gonna pop out. And you know, there's just a whole lot of stuff to get that to be real the way there was with all of the last transformations.

1:08:48But I think this is just a giant category shift. Like I don't, I think it's just incontrovertible that it is. Well, it's kind of funny like when Gemini came out, all the press take was like, oh, it's not that different from GPE4. I guess we're done with AI now. We can go back to bed. And I'm like, that is the dumbest possible interpretation of that story that you could come up with, I think. Like if all the takes you could have had on that. I think that was like the dumbest one, honestly. Like, you know, I don't think it's, like, you could say many things about either company, you could say many things about the science.

1:09:22But like, guess there's nothing here to see is not one of them. For somebody listening that wants to not fall behind on this and or find opportunity for their product, other than just playing with it, which would, is what everyone is always saying, just like play with it, run, use chat, GPE2, use all, use Bardon, all these things. Is there any advice you give listeners for how to approach thinking about AI, how to integrate into the stuff they're doing? Yeah, I agree with you. Just play with it is not really great advice. I think the best technique I've really seen for learning things is to pick a thing to do with the thing you're trying to learn, right?

1:10:00Even if it's an unreasonable, even if it's a goofy, weird thing, right? Like, you know, I'm gonna figure out how to like draw funny pictures with this programming language or whatever. Like, you know, even if it's a dumb thing like that, like picking in some arbitrary goal and being a little bit stubborn about trying to get yourself to it is a good way to learn stuff. And like, then the question is like, what goals are you picking? So try to pick goals that are, you know, lead somewhere maybe at least a little bit interesting. So like, you know, if your goal is just like, I'm gonna mess around with GBT, which I GBT for an hour, that's not really much of a goal.

1:10:33If it's like, I'm gonna go try to build a GBT that can do this part of my job. Let's see how close I can get, you know, that's more interesting, right? And I do think like, unfortunately, one of the other ways in which this is very reminiscent of the early .com era. And I think plenty of people have said this is this sense of exhaustion and keeping up. Like, there's so much stuff going on right now. And that's, I think another good strong indicator that something really big is going on, right? Where it's just like very, very difficult to keep track of all the stuff that's happening. It's kind of interesting because like, I remember going just to pick on, just to kick crypto's corpse one last time.

1:11:11Like, there was some tweet like at the beginning of the year that I saw that somebody was like, yeah, it took like the AIBROs like a week to come up with as many use cases as, you know, crypto came up within that decade, which definitely feels true, right? It's just like so much stuff going on. And, you know, I think you just have to try to keep track of it. I, one of the other things I think is going on in a moment, which feels a lot like the cloud moment to me is like, it's hard to get the first idea. The zero to one is hard. Like, understanding that there's something there at all is the really hard part because you have to be lucky and you have to be talented and you have to look in the right place and like, do some very hard work.

1:11:47But once you understand that there's something there, like the cloud model works or their generate AI matters and like scale works and stuff like that, once you're there, like the one to many all the optimization stuff, like that happens in parallel, it happens really quickly. Many, many, many people can do it. There's a lot of energy. You'll just go really fast. So I think we're in that phase. We're just like, we're in the elaboration phase. We're like, we understand this step and people are just filling in all the white spaces as fast as they can. So that'll slow down eventually, hopefully. We'll see what the next year brings, but yeah, it's a hard time.

1:12:23It's hard for professionals even. I think you just have to read a lot. You have to think a lot. You have to play with stuff. You have to choose your battles. You have to pick good targets. Pick a goal in your domain that would matter to you if you can get to it and then go try to solve that problem with some specific technology and get to know that technology. Maybe pick the technology based on how popular it seems if you're not learning something that lots of people know. Because they're all good stuff. I think you just have these kind of mundane. I don't think it's really secret. I don't think they're kind of mundane strategies, but you just have to pick some stuff and do some homework and it's not, there's no magic single bullet to learning this stuff.

1:12:58You just have to run. It's like, how do I run this sprint without getting out of breath? You know, like you're gonna be out of breath. Run hard. I think that's just what it is. I love that advice. And I love it connects everything else you've been talking about is find some problem. Someone has find kind of some value you could provide and then think about how can AI potentially provide that. I think that's really practical, great advice. Maybe that last question just around Microsoft. It feels like Microsoft is firing all cylinders. It feels like it's become one of the most innovative companies out there.

1:13:30It feels like Satsya is known now as the most innovative, best executing CEO out there potentially. That's just kind of what it feels like. Being on the inside, I'm just curious. What is it that you think Microsoft is doing so right or what how they think that enables them to be so innovative and continue to be such a behemoth as so much has changed in tech? Those are a couple of things. First of all, I think very, very highly of Satsya or I wouldn't be there. I really, really like Satsya. He is very much what he appears to be from the outside. I've had plenty of candid private conversations with him and watched him in meetings and stuff like that.

1:14:05He's a very decent, genuine, honest, high energy, caring individual with a ton of empathy. He's really motivational. He, in a way that is not destructive, he believes very strongly that the leader's job is to raise the energy of the organization and he really lives that. And I watch him in meetings where I'm a domain expert and I cannot believe how engaged he is in stuff and how much he understands about something that I know. He's not as deep an expert as some of the people in the room are and he's fully in there. So he is a really incredible leader in many ways. That's one thing. I think another is that culture is very humble, honestly.

1:14:50I mean, it's interesting going from Google to Microsoft and I don't wanna draw comparisons or anything like that. But there are definitely similarities and differences between companies and I think one thing that stands out with Microsoft is it's a humble culture does unglamorous work all the time to make businesses be successful. So it's got that sort of mindset of just like hard work and humility, which I value a lot. And then I think there's just, I mean, honestly, there's just a fantastic number of really talented people working there. It's kind of funny like this year, I've been writing a lot of patents because there's just a lot of stuff going on in the world.

1:15:25And like, I've written more patents this year by a lot than the rest of my career combined. And I commented on the number of, I feel like I've written like 15 patents this year. He commented to my patent attorney that I worked with. He's like, ah, that's nothing the chief science officer wrote 700 of them one year during the mobile booth. It's like whatever you feel about patents and I don't necessarily love fans, all of it's part of my job to write them. But like, you know, that's the kind of people that are there. Like it's just fantastically talented people with just really deep experience at a lot of different levels.

1:15:58I think that's part of it too. You know, there's just a lot of really good folks there. Kevin Scott, who I work for, is one of the smartest, he's probably the smartest person I've ever been fortunate to work directly with. He's definitely one of the smartest I've ever met. So he's pretty fantastic. And the group around him is pretty fantastic. And the leadership in Windows and Office is pretty fantastic. So it's just a lot of good people and a lot of good attitude and a good leader, I think, is kind of the answer. And look, you know, it's always luck too, right? Like Kevin and Sasha made a bet on OpenAI, you know, a few years back, you know, and they're doing some extraordinary things with capital raise and the support of that technology and so they're bad.

1:16:34And so there's, you know, that doesn't happen by accident either. No drama there, by the way. I would know any very children there. Here it's called. I think it's from a small space. Most under the radar startup out there. Amazing. Sam, is there anything else you want to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Is there anything you want to leave listeners with? Mostly, I think probably like take all of this is more of my personal opinions and not Microsoft official stands like this is just me being an engineer. Like it's not, I'm not here as a Microsoft representative necessarily.

1:17:11But yeah, I don't know. B is not, you know, built stuff. Like, self problems built stuff. Like that's what it is, right? Like, you know, that job's quote. Fuck around. Fuck around. Well, that job's quote is right. Like the world was built like people just like you. Like that's the, that's the saying. Like, you know, like it's really true. You know, you don't have to have permission. Like you just have to have energy. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Probably not. Great answer. Sam, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

1:17:44I like weird book. Like I like business book called Invisible Cities by Italo, Kelvino, which is this very beautiful meditation on the nature of cities and the nature of Venice and I read it the first time I was in Italy, read it at the college and it just like blew all the circuits in my brain when I went to Venice. So that was pretty cool. The other one I recommend to people with some caution is this very intensive disturbing book called The Wasp Factory by In Banks, which is probably the creepiest and hardest book I've ever read, but it's a very interesting psychological deep dive. So those are both fiction.

1:18:18Yeah, if you're looking for like business advice, I think the business advice one is probably where good ideas come from, Steven Johnson. I really like that book. I think some of the stuff about the adjacent possible. I think it's an old book now, but I think it's pretty timely. Like still, I can get some good stuff in there. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoy? My favorite one right now, my guilty pleasure is watching Gary Oldman be a completely disgusting over the hill. British spy in Slow Horses, which is pretty fun. And I'm actually having a little fun with like the retro monster stuff, like monarch and stuff like that.

1:18:57It's kind of fun to watch. I don't know. I have like absolute junk food taste when it comes to the, yeah, of creepy, creepy monsters and bugs. Yeah, I love it. Science, shooting science, things that blow up a lot. I'm happy. I love her, Keith. By the way, have you seen Scavenger's reign? Scavenger reigns Scavenger's reign? Okay, you love it. It's an HBO. It's incredible. It's an animated sci -fi thing. And it's very creepy, slimy, kind of alien things. And it's so beautiful. Do you have a favorite interview question that you'd like to ask candidates when you're interviewing them? I'm one that got banned at Google and I like it.

1:19:35I still think it's a fun question. It's how many zeros are at the end of a hundred factorial. And the reason I like it, yeah, it's like you've made the face, right? Like, I'm going to ask Chad G .P .T. for this answer. Well, there's a thing. Well, don't though, because like, it's like, the reason I ask it is, it seems like an unreasonable and impossible answer. And if you sit down and think about it a little bit, I'm not going to tell you how to reason through it. But like, you can figure out the answer to it in a few minutes. Like, and so the only reason I ask is not to get to the answer. It's because I just want to see how people react when I give them something that seems impossible and unreasonable.

1:20:06And some people just like back off and, you know, refuse to engage with it. And some people are just like, I don't want me to roll my sleeves up to see how far I can get in this thing. And, you know, if you do that, you can actually get through. And I just think it's interesting. Like, that's, because that's building stuff, right? Like, you know, that's a good signal of like, when somebody tells you you can't write an app word processor on the browser and you can't do collaboration. Like, do you roll your sleeves up and deal with it? Or do you like, fall over? And what was the question again? Just to make sure that you're doing that.

1:20:34Zeroes are at the end of 100 factorial in decimal. Yeah, written this. And then why did they get banned? I think you got known. And like, you know, I'm aware. So like, I actually, the funny thing is like one of the more senior directors, actually is a SPP now, I think. I interviewed, Dave Bezarus. I interviewed him when he came in and I asked him that question and his response was, I don't do math next question. And so I failed him. I was the veto. And then this policy where we're friends now, like, they have this policy where like, one veto is actually a good signal, like, if you're controversial as a candidate, they would like take a hard look at you.

1:21:08And so my veto may have gotten him higher. Because I was like, I don't know. He wouldn't answer this question. That's like a red flag for me. So don't hire him. I need to be a great person. So it's maybe not a good question anyways. That comes back to when your other lessons of the best ideas have some people that are just very anti that idea. It all circles back. Next question. What is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? My father -in -law work and my brother -in -law work for the American car companies. And I've never had American cars. I just drive Japanese cars because I grew up in Detroit and just hated that culture.

1:21:43And so recently we bought a Ford Mustang, Machi, the electric Ford Mustang. And I just love this shit out of that car. And I don't know why. It's just like a really fun car to drive. It's like very surprising to have this American muscle car that I'm just really, this is an electric American muscle car that I really like. So that's probably the current product that I'm enjoying most right now. Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often repeat yourself while finding useful share friends or family either in work or in life? Virtue from error. Yeah, I think that's like, it's become one for me.

1:22:15And I, the more I say it, the more I like it. But I just, you know, I just like this idea of like, you're going to fuck up, like make something from it and be creative with your mistakes. Like, I like that a lot. So I've been, that's, I think that's current one. At least my current one. And say it again, just so people get it. There's lots of different ways to say it. But I just like virtue from error is probably the cleanest way to say it or from error virtue. Final question. Apparently, you're the only person who has sold both a company to Google. I like the cheerleading arm. Both a company and also 200 pounds of blood sauce.

1:22:53Yes. Just Google. Tell us the story. Story. So I have a friend who dropped a tech industry to start a company up in San Francisco called Boccalone, which was like an artisan salumi thing in the fairy building. And so you make blood sausage and stuff. So there was this wonderful insane chef back in the day when Google had like really high end cuisine in the campuses, like probably like 2005 or something. I know sorry, probably 2008, something like that. And like, so my friend Mark shows up. The chef, JC, had the word Flaugra tattooed onto his knuckles. So that's, you know, that's the kind of guy he was.

1:23:29He was just super awesome. So like I had Mark show up to like talk to JC about buying some of those products because I was an investor in that company. And he showed up with a bag of blood sausages that was he's like, here, you should take this one and put it in a refrigerator and then like, why? He's like, it's dripping. I'm like, it's fine. He's like, it's dripping blood. So like, they hadn't get the packaging, right? So we like showed the blood sausages to JC. He cooked some of it up. It was really good. And he was like, yeah, it's awesome. I'll buy a couple hundred pounds of it. And like, so technically because I was an investor in that company, I sold both the company rightly and two hundred pounds of blood sausage to Google, which I think is a unique accomplishment.

1:24:06And I would just absolutely love to meet anybody who has also done that. I love it. We'll have a party. Did you get stock though for that blood sausage? No, I did not get stocked or anything. That guy was crazy. Like at one point, just a quick JC story, like at one point, Google rented some goats to like graze the hillside across the way. And JC was a very non politically correct, non woke kind of guy. And he did not like all the sort of attitude at Google. So when these goats were across the hill, he bought a goat carcass from somewhere else and roasted it over a spit and carried it whole through the line for lunch one day to serve up, just like completely tweaked people.

1:24:48So that was a different time at Google. We killed these. Yeah. Amazing. Sam, that's it. We did it. Two final questions. Working folks, find you if they want to potentially follow up on any of this. And then how can listeners be useful to you? Well, I was upstack, which is Sunday letters from Sam that I write a letter roughly every Sunday that I've been doing for about 10 years. Not that particular stuff. Well, I've been writing letters to my engineering team on Sunday since I was the head of engineering at box. And I think that's like 12 years now or something. I just started doing it to keep myself accountable and people liked it.

1:25:21So I just kept doing it. So now I do it public. I repost them on LinkedIn. You can find me there. You can message me on LinkedIn if you want to. I'm hesitant to give out my personal email address because this is probably going out to a lot of people and I don't want to get Sam. Smart, smart man. Little last funny story at Google. My email address at Google got leaked somehow. And I was kind of a little bit notorious during the early days of Rately. And so he's spammer used it for what's known as a Joe job where you send something out, fakes emails out with somebody else's email addresses, the return to reply to.

1:25:57So like several hundred million emails went out and all bounced. And so for a while, I had my own Gmail front end server that would filter them out for like a couple of weeks till that died down. Let's make sure no one does that to you right now. Oh yeah. You didn't answer the final question. How can listeners be useful to you other than not helping that spam that big team? I guess the thing I guess I'm interested in is people making interesting progress in the direction of that product vision that I talked about independent action, the UI, part of this stuff generating UI, consuming UI, all that stuff.

1:26:32I think I'm curious about that. I mean, an interesting idea is like anything surprising that seems like you'd like to have somebody pay attention. I tend to, I entertain weird ideas all the time. I do my best to entertain weird ideas and kind of live what I preach. So if you think you have something that's really resonating that you think you want to have somebody pay attention to, you can kind of me. I'll take a look at it. I'll do my best. I won't look at stuff that's incremental and boring. It has to be actually interesting and disruptive. So I know, I don't care. I'm not going to review like the 27th like memo writing, AI chatbot thing that plugs into outlook or whatever, like I don't care.

1:27:11I think that's a final good takeaway is that's a litmus test for are you working on something innovative, which I think has been a great theme of this conversation. It's something that'll piss me off. That'd be more, yeah. Sam, thank you so much for being here. My pleasure. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'spodcast .com.

1:27:46See you in the next episode.